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Richard Ford puts American traditional ideologies, such as freedom, equality, independence, and self-reliance, under review in his novel, Independence Day. By situating one of the book’s protagonists, Frank Bascombe, in the time-period 1988, Ford considers whether certain founding American ideals are still effective in contemporary America. In order to solve such questions, Bascombe frequently refers to the philosophical ideas found in Carl Becker’s The Declaration of Independence, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance. Furthermore, Bascombe recommends these books to his son Paul, so that he might deal with the combined stress of his parent’s divorce, the difficult accommodation of step-father Charley O’Dell, and his unclear self identity. As the novel unfolds, its plot, however, begins to circle around Bascombe’s profession, a realtor or “a residential specialist” in Haddam, New Jersey. Rather than trying to sell more houses to customers, he is more interested in showing and explaining to them the history and culture of the Haddam area, a culturally and ethnically homogeneous community inhabited by white middle-class Americans. Even though the Haddamites are descended from people who strongly upheld the original American principles, they are reluctant to practice such ideals in their own day to day lives. This view is starkly proven in the way the community excludes anyone from a minority culture. Thus when Bascombe hears of a Korean family moving into Haddam, he worries that it will gradually lead to a decline in white American culture. The ideal American cultural geography Ford implies in his novel is the “social ecology” in Robert N. Bellah’s words: a theory in which each homogeneous culture co-exists separately as archipelagos.